Help your student craft excellent sentences and paragraphs in writing practice through learning and using critical middle school must-haves for writing well — and gain understanding with practice in this hands-on writing course that goes beyond “normal” writing courses with practical writing using critical thinking (no workbooks). Take the 6/7-3 course with this course to gain a full semester’s credit for writing.

Total Classes: 6

Class Dates and Starting Times:

Mondays, March 3 to April 7, 2025. 

11:30 AM Eastern (10:30 Central; 9:30 Mountain; 8:30 Pacific)

Duration: 50 minutes per class

Prerequisite: Each course in the 6/7 series builds upon the next. Registration in the Writing Essentials 1: Punctuation & Grammar I (MS 6/7-1), Writing Essentials 2: Excellent Sentence & Paragraph Writing I (MS 6/7-2), and Writing Essentials 3: Punctuation and Grammar II (MS 6/7-3) courses is required so that your student has all of the tools and knowledge necessary to succeed in this course. You may take the prerequisite courses LIVE or in Unlimited Access (recording) before or during this course.

Suggested Grade Level: 7th or accelerated 6th grade

Suggested Credit: One-half (½) of a semester's credit for Writing or English. Precede with MS 6/7-3 for a full semester credit.

Instructor: Bonnie Donlon, BA

Course Description: This essential writing course continues to give your student the skills for how to create well-crafted sentences and paragraphs using specific nouns, strong verbs, appropriate adjectives and adverbs, prepositions and prepositional phrases, and compound sentence structures. This course specifically sets your student up to succeed in crafting longer writing (paragraphs and beyond). Special emphasis is placed on using words correctly in systems of testing such as standardized tests and the student's ability to identify improper word choice while making critical corrections in thinking and writing.

Course Outline:

• Class 1: Identifying and building on specific nouns and strong verbs in sentences

• Class 2: Identifying and building on appropriate adjectives and adverbs in sentences

• Class 3: Identifying and correctly using prepositions, prepositional phrases, and compound sentence structures within sentences and paragraphs

• Class 4: How to easily identify incorrect usage in standardized tests

• Class 5: Creating paragraphs with strong transitions and connectives

• Class 6: Critical know-how for writing multi-paragraph essays

Course Materials: Course materials are provided free of charge. Microsoft Word or the ability to convert a document to a Word-compatible document is required. If you do not own Microsoft Word, you can use a system such as Google Docs and convert to Word documents FREE.

Homework: This course uses an estimated one to three hours per week for homework outside of class time, depending on the student's abilities entering the course. Homework includes readings, activities, and writing assignments that get your student thinking critically and using the content learned while writing/composing. All writing assignments are graded by the instructor.

Note: All student work needs to be 100% the student's own work and the student's own writing. Nothing can be copied from anywhere else unless a source for the text is given on the assignment. Any students who copy work from elsewhere will receive a zero on the assignment. Repeated copying will result in failure of the course.

 Fee: $129 if you register on or before November 15. $149 after Nov. 15 for all 6 classes. (Registration closes one week before the first day of class. After that date, registrations are not guaranteed. There is a $20 surcharge for late enrollments after the course is closed.)